Love is red | Roma: photo by mr.reverend, 26 September 2015
deer, highway 25 [Durand, Wisconsin]: photo by Amy Fichter, 24 May 2014
Access denied | Roma: photo by mr.reverend, 15 November 2016
deer, highway 25 [Durand, Wisconsin]: photo by Amy Fichter, 24 May 2014
Access denied | Roma: photo by mr.reverend, 15 November 2016
You can't dip your head in the same river twice
when that river is flowing with occult blood, my Love
and if this is why you are more beautiful every day
then red must have become the color of life
and what we ought to be wearing is not pink hats but red ones
and if not why not, my Love
for when red turns blue it means the life is being drained out of it
but this is only true when things go from merely pretty bad to that other thing
uncovering the runway... Just hate this light, the spectrum peeks in two spots: UV and blue, and to make things even worse it pulses, messes up the exposure system and if you are not careful will kill the images beyond any repair... [Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week, Moscow]: photo by Alex Naanou, 2 April 2013
Nairobi_Kenya: photo by Baptiste MOURRIERAS, 28 May 2016
Smaller and Smaller | Portland, OR 2015: photo by Josh Marcotte, 15 May 2015
Smaller and Smaller | Portland, OR 2015: photo by Josh Marcotte, 15 May 2015
The man in love | Roma: photo by mr.reverend, 14 September 2013
Untitled: photo by Yuro De Iullis, 24 September 2017
6 comments:
Bob Dylan 1999 Valencia Malaga Zurich d1018 1
Valencia (15-Apr); Málaga (17-April); Zürich (25-April)
01 Opening Titles 02 Introduction 03 Don't Think Twice, It's All Right (Málaga) 04 My Back Pages (Valencia) 05 Masters Of War (Zürich) 06 Desolation Row (Málaga) 07 Girl Of The North Country (Valencia) 08 The Times They Are A-Changin'(Málaga) 09 A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall (Zürich) 10 Tangled Up In Blue (Valencia) 11 Mr. Tambourine Man (Valencia) 12 Forever Young (Valencia) 13 It's All Over Now, Baby Blue (Zürich) 14 Blowin' In the Wind (Valencia) 15 Can't Wait (Valencia) 16 Not Dark Yet (Zürich) 17 I Want You (Málaga) 18 Just Like A Woman (Valencia) 19 Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again (Zürich) 20 Senor (Tales Of Yankee Power) (Valencia) 21 Band Introductions (Valencia) 22 Highway 61 Revisited (Valencia) 23 Love Sick (Valencia) 24 Rainy Day Women #12 & 35 (Valencia) 25 Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat (Málaga) (clipped 8:06/2 stills) 26 Not Fade Away (Zürich)
photo #2 cf. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42775/traveling-through-the-dark
Vassilis, That scene captured in the photo is both grisly and all too familiar, on the roadways. A lot of same hereabouts as well. Nothing like coming upon the still warm body of a pregnant doe, eyes wide open, lying dead by the side of the freeway feeder, after being dragged there by an impatient motorist, so that the sacred traffic flow shall proceed unimpeded.
Unwitting pedestrians esp women w/small kids who come upon such scenes often recoil in horror and punch up 911. Cops come, patiently explain what is about to happen. If deer still breathing, shoot in head.
I take it all this is by Murican custom.
"This stretch of highway is particularly bad...Sometimes they're marked with neon green X's--I'm assuming that is for someone who is coming to pick them up--but sometimes it doesn't happen for a while." -- photographer Amy Fichter. re. her photo.
As I'm sure you know the Stafford poem has become a sort of chopping block for earnest young critics to take out their rapier intelligences upon. One, I think it may have been R Perelman, opined, if I recall correctly through the mists of forty years of industrious innovation, that WS was proposing a "real life persona".
Traveling through the Dark
Traveling through the dark I found a deer
dead on the edge of the Wilson River road.
It is usually best to roll them into the canyon:
that road is narrow; to swerve might make more dead.
By glow of the tail-light I stumbled back of the car
and stood by the heap, a doe, a recent killing;
she had stiffened already, almost cold.
I dragged her off; she was large in the belly.
My fingers touching her side brought me the reason—
her side was warm; her fawn lay there waiting,
alive, still, never to be born.
Beside that mountain road I hesitated.
The car aimed ahead its lowered parking lights;
under the hood purred the steady engine.
I stood in the glare of the warm exhaust turning red;
around our group I could hear the wilderness listen.
I thought hard for us all—my only swerving—,
then pushed her over the edge into the river.
William E. Stafford
In propria persona I was always bothered a bit by the thought that "our group", that anonymous category of Oregonian night travelers, might have been hunting.
Thinking constellation and feeling constellation merging. Then that ringing like Basho's flowers ringing after the bells stop. I like the demotic, stiletto poem too. And the Stafford is fondly remembered, although I too remember Stafford being singled out for assault when everything was changing (before it changed again).
Thank you, William. Good word(s).
The Stafford seems to have survived the glancing body blows dealt out by best minds of a completely forgettable subsequent generation.
(Cf Keats' Nightingale Ode, on the "hungry generations" that tread down everything underfoot.)
Fine poem by WS.
Hilton
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